End of Term Evidence

In this 250th SoTL Blog post, I would like to share several ways that you can collect evidence of your effective teaching at the end of the term. Many of us are finishing the spring semester and although we are very busy, this is an ideal time to collect further evidence to support our teaching approach. The University of Michigan’s Center for Research on Learning and Teaching categorizes types of data that we can collect. The categories include an Overview, Evidence Collected from a Colleague; From Students; and From Yourself.

The Overview page contains the following articles:

Frequently, the major evidence that we collect from students is the Student Evaluation of Teaching (SETs), which research has clearly shown are biased and do not correlate to effective teaching. However, prior to the end of the term, you could collect student perceptions on your course, perhaps on specific assignments and/or teaching methodologies, as well as the level of accessibility of your teaching materials. There are several ways to collect this data, which include focus groups, or asking a person from your CTL to visit your class and offering a small group perception session. You could also include prompts for final assignments, projects or group work that asks students to share how they approached the assignment and perhaps what advice they might give your next students.

Finally, this is an ideal time of the year for our own reflections. The Michigan webpage suggest collecting the following data: